Olive oil fraud: it is real olive oil, and that is the problem

The honey and vanilla pieces on this site describe the same shape of fraud. Something is in the jar that should not be there, so the job is finding it.

Olive oil is not like that. The most common fraud on the market is not adulteration at all. It is grade fraud: genuine olive oil, pressed from genuine olives, sold as a category it does not meet. Everything in the tank belongs there. It is simply worth less than the invoice says.

That changes what your testing has to do, and it is why a clean certificate of analysis on olive oil proves less than most buyers assume.

The grades, and why they are where the money is

Olive oil is sold in a legally defined ladder. Extra virgin at the top, then virgin, then lampante, which is virgin-quality oil so defective it cannot legally be sold for consumption without refining. Below and alongside sit refined olive oil, the blend of refined and virgin sold simply as "olive oil", and olive pomace oil extracted from the residue with solvent.

The chemistry across that ladder is nearly identical, because it is all olive oil. What separates the grades is quality: free acidity, oxidation, and above all taste and smell. The price gap between the top and the bottom of the ladder is enormous, and it widened dramatically after successive drought years wrecked Mediterranean harvests.

So the fraud writes itself. Buy at the bottom of the ladder, sell at the top, change nothing about what is in the tank.

That is exactly what enforcement keeps finding. In the Europol-supported Operation Omegabad in November 2023, Spanish and Italian investigators arrested eleven people and seized more than 260,000 litres. The method was blending lampante oil into virgin and extra virgin, supported by falsified documents. The following year, Operation OPSON XIII dismantled eleven criminal networks and issued 104 arrest warrants, with adulterated olive oil among the headline findings. Italy's own enforcement effort in 2024 ran more than 8,200 olive oil inspections and found irregularities in around a quarter of samples.

A quarter is not a rounding error. It is a supply chain in which the wrong grade is routine.

Why the certificate of analysis does not settle it

Three reasons, and they compound.

The parameters are a published target. The tests are set out in law, so anybody can read which numbers a sample will be judged against. That is good for enforcement and it is also a specification for defeating enforcement. In the Omegabad network, investigators found the group had been blending substandard oils and manipulating fat and erythrodiol levels specifically so the product would pass the quality checks. The oil was designed to produce a compliant certificate.

This is the difference between testing for authenticity and testing against a threshold. A threshold tells you the sample is inside a boundary. It does not tell you the sample got there honestly.

The defining attribute of extra virgin is sensory, not chemical. Extra virgin is not a chemistry grade. It is a grade that requires assessment by a trained panel, which has to find no detectable defect and a genuine fruity character. A laboratory report full of chemical parameters and no panel result has not tested the thing that legally makes the oil extra virgin.

If your certificate of analysis is chemistry only, ask what the sensory result was. If the answer is that no panel assessed it, then whatever the paperwork says, nobody has verified the grade.

Soft deodorisation is designed to survive the test. Gently deodorising a defective oil at low temperature strips out the smell and taste that would fail a sensory panel, without leaving the obvious signatures of full refining. The result is an oil that tastes of nothing much, passes as extra virgin, and is not extra virgin. Regulators have added markers aimed at catching it, and specialist tests exist beyond the legal parameter set, but none of it is in a standard certificate unless you ask for it by name.

The adulteration cases, for completeness

Straightforward dilution with cheaper oils does still happen, and it is worth knowing what it looks like.

Soybean, sunflower, corn, rapeseed and palm oil are the usual additions. These are detectable through fatty acid profile, sterol composition and triglyceride analysis, which is why they tend to be caught. Crude versions of this fraud include colouring a clear seed oil with chlorophyll for green and carotenoids for yellow so it looks the part, which fools a consumer and not a laboratory.

Hazelnut oil is the difficult one, because its composition is close enough to olive that low-level addition is genuinely hard to resolve.

And origin fraud sits alongside all of it. Oil labelled as one country's product but grown and pressed elsewhere is not a chemical question at all. Routine analysis cannot answer it, because the oil is authentic olive oil. Establishing origin needs isotope or trace element work against reference datasets, which is a different order of expense.

The bit specific to Great Britain

Here is something that surprises people.

The EU rewrote its olive oil marketing standards in 2022, replacing the 1991 characteristics regulation and the 2012 marketing standards regulation with a delegated act and an implementing act covering categories, conformity checks and methods of analysis. Those took effect in November 2022 and apply in the EU and, through the Windsor Framework, in Northern Ireland.

Great Britain did not follow. GB still operates on the assimilated versions of the 1991 and 2012 regulations, enforced through the Olive Oil (Marketing Standards) Regulations 2014, with inspection by the Animal and Plant Health Agency.

Two practical consequences. If you supply both GB and either the EU or Northern Ireland, you are working to two different versions of the same rules. And when a supplier tells you their oil is compliant, compliant with which regime is now a real question rather than a pedantic one.

There is a third point, and it comes from Defra's own explanatory memorandum on the EU changes. In the UK, there are no certification or border checks for olive oil marketing standards. Whatever assurance exists on the grade of oil arriving at your site, it is not being provided at the border. It is being provided by you.

What to actually do

The honest position is that you cannot test your way out of this at a sensible cost. Full authenticity work on every delivery is not proportionate for most sites. What is proportionate is knowing precisely what your current assurance does and does not cover, and closing the gap where it matters.

The Monday morning list

1. Pull the last certificate of analysis for every olive oil line you buy. Check whether a sensory panel result appears anywhere on it. For anything you buy or sell as extra virgin, that absence is the finding.
2. Write down which grade each specification actually requires. Extra virgin, virgin, or "olive oil". Sites routinely pay for extra virgin in a product where the specification does not require it, and equally claim extra virgin on a label while buying against a looser spec.
3. Ask each supplier which regulatory regime they certify against, and check it matches the market you sell into. GB and the EU are no longer the same answer.
4. Treat price as a data point in your vulnerability assessment. An offer meaningfully below the market for the grade is the single strongest fraud indicator in this commodity, and it is free to monitor.
5. If you buy extra virgin in volume, budget for periodic independent verification including sensory, rather than relying entirely on supplier certificates. Not every batch. Enough that your supplier knows it happens.
6. Record in your vulnerability assessment that the primary risk here is grade misdescription rather than adulteration. If your assessment only considers foreign oils being added, it is assessing the less likely fraud.